Monday, 15 March 2010

It seems to me that the abortion so-called debate in the US has never been more heated as the Democrats make a final push for healthcare reform. The lies and bullshit are flying -- just google 'abortion' -- fast and furiously. Each side is shrieeeeking either that 'YES! Abortion is so funded under the plan!' or that 'NO! Abortion is not atall atall funded under the plan!'

I have no idea whether it is covered or not. And frankly, I've ceased to care about healthcare reform in the Excited States. We at DJ! called it back in July last year. Any attempt to reform the system significantly would founder on abortion. Because there is no common ground on women's reproductive rights.

Safe, legal and rare. President Clinton first used this phrase, as early as 1992, to capture the essence of a desired national policy on abortion. For the most part, even the most ardent abortion rights supporters have come to embrace this notion and to accept the validity of its two-fold underlying premise: Abortion in the United States must remain legal in order to be safe, and at the same time, even with abortion services legal and accessible to women who need them, abortion can be rare -- or at least far less common than it is now.

Of course, the fetus fetishists leapt on the central idiocy -- trying to speak out of both sides of the mouth -- saying, 'Well, if abortion is no biggie, then why try to make it rare?'

The Democrats dumped that meme in 2008 and went for a policy that, again, tried for common ground, this time by including tepid support for pregnant women and adoption while asserting that abortion should be legal and safe.

Put simply, abortion rates around the world are high where unplanned pregnancy is high, and they are low where women and couples are better equipped to prevent those pregnancies they wish to postpone or avoid altogether.

Sciencey-facty oriented people cite all kinds of sciencey-facty studies to prove the point.

Offering young women free hormonal contraception could lead to a significant fall in abortions, the results of a new health project indicate.

As part of the project, 3,500 women aged 20-24, who were living in two different cities in Norway, were offered free hormonal contraception for one year. By the end of the year, the abortion rate in both cities had halved.

The Norwegian Directorate of Health initiated the project after a previous project led to similar success. In 2002, Norwegian women aged between 16 and 19 were offered free hormone-based contraception. Abortion rates fell dramatically and reached their lowest level in 2005.

In 2006, after the authorities modified the scheme and introduced part-payment for hormonal contraception, the number of terminations among this age group began to rise again. Since then, the abortion rate among 16 to 19-year-olds has risen every year.